


Hope lost

by V6ilill



Series: Shooting star falls fast, falls far [1]
Category: The Outer Worlds (Video Game)
Genre: Autistic Captain, Character Study, Gen, Hopeful Ending, Hurt No Comfort, Not Beta Read, Psychological Horror, Sad with a Happy Ending, Spoilers, Tragedy
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2020-02-25
Updated: 2020-02-25
Packaged: 2021-02-27 21:01:37
Rating: Teen And Up Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 1,470
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/22892164
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/V6ilill/pseuds/V6ilill
Summary: In a dark and dusty lab on the edge of the galaxy, a lone scientist works tirelessly to save those who cannot save themselves.Thirty-five years later, an old man embittered by a hundred and three failures, watches over his youngest Guinea pig, already all too used to death, beyond despair yet still holding out hope for a miracle.Note: kind of a prologue to the Dartboard, but contains no spoilers. Can be read as a standalone.
Relationships: Phineas Welles & Original Female Character, The Captain & Phineas Welles
Series: Shooting star falls fast, falls far [1]
Series URL: https://archiveofourown.org/series/1560577
Kudos: 6





	Hope lost

The gray-eyed woman lay in the half-open cryopod, blond hair fading into white, unseeing face frowning slightly. She couldn’t have been more than sixty years old, 85 if one counted her decades lost in cryosleep, left to dream futilely about freedom that would never be. The hibernation suit was a little less form-fitting than it ought to have been, sleeves rolled up to make way for tubes and needles. Her name mattered not, all she was in that moment was subject 24. A woman without any connections aboard the ship, familial or otherwise. A woman who no one would miss.

A young man, perhaps in his twenties, maybe even thirties, stood over her, an electronic notepad in hand. He smiled widely, eyes alight with nervous excitement, though his smile was tinged with something else - fear, perhaps? Anxiety? Nevertheless, he seemed positively giddy, naively believing in a miracle that would elude him for years to come. His labcoat was stained in many colors, though it was clear he had tried scrubbing them off with extreme prejudice. His matted black hair was dirty, even as he had tried to keep it in check with a comb.

The man shifted, setting down the notepad onto a metal table, guiding yet another needle into the woman’s withered body. He stared intensely at his subject, willing her to pull through, to be graced with the correct formula, the correct proportion of ingredients. His smile never faltered, just as the old woman’s frown remained impassionate. She seemed to him like his chemistry teacher - stern and gray, waiting even with closed eyes to witness a mistake in his formula.

She took a deep breath thrgough her mouth, pale lips sucking in air for the first time in twenty years. She was dreaming of swimming in a pool, of emerging after a long dive to the faces of her family and friends. The man smiled, a ghostly pallor brought on by a dozen sleepless nights lifted, even if for a moment. He checked his multitude of scanners - readings were stable. The subject’s sleep was so light, she was basically napping. Just one and she would be awake.

The next moment, the illusion of progress came crashing down on the lone scientist. The woman’s eyes opened in all of their frenzied glory, gray and old. She gurgled as her lungs broke down, as her heart malfunctioned, as every nerve cell fired off its own signal that had no meaning. The man desperately fumbled with his tubes and needles, the scanners all but forgotten. He had no need for them anymore. The screams of the old woman told him everything he could ever need. She witnessed some fragments of the world before her, wanting only to call out to the man who she believed to be her long-dead younger brother, but nothing she ever did mattered anymore. She convulsed, then seized again, chinks of skin and flesh liquefying as if she were a decaying corpse. Her eyes burst like pimples under pressure, spraying viscous fluid all over her cryosuit.

Her dream ended on her drowning in an endless sea as her brother watched. Her hopes ended quite the same.

Finally, the trashing and hollering ceased, and silence reigned supreme once more. The man wiped sweat from his forehead, his smile long gone. He sighed, taking a mop from its corner, emptying the cryopod of liquefied remains. Two metal baubles caught his eye and he put them onto his table, along with several more hairpins, gold teeth and even a prosthetic hip. So many bits of metal to remember so many needlessly lost human lives. Perhaps if he tweaked the formula . . . perhaps if he checked more often . . . perhaps if he had more talent . . . perhaps then he could wash the blood from his hands.

-

Thirty-five years later, the man, now old and gray himself, in another lab, with another woman, found himself in the same scene. His hair was wild and unkempt, knowing nothing of a hairbrush, his labcoat and gloves were covered in the remains of previous experiments. His smile was the same (though harried with a thousand horrors and strengthened through suffering), but unmoving and unchanging. It was everything he could do, after killing so many of those he sought to save.

The woman looked frankly more like a girl, narrow eyes closed and pointy eyebrows perked up like gothic arches. Her whole appearance, down to her not particularly impressive height, made her seem like a funny kind of lass. Her hair was black and curly, tangled in every way possible, sworn enemies with any shampoo. Her skin was the color of soil back on Earth, but her most important feature was the smile. The smile which had lasted her seventy years of lost time, which not so much as twitched as tubes and monitors were attached to her body.

In truth, the barely-grown girl of twenty-three years had been chosen precisely for her enthusiastic smile. She would become cannon fodder, a tool with the purpose of finding more chemical. She would be the vessel to revive the important people, the scientists, engineers, terraformers. Her smile seemed to indicate her willingness to face death and danger, her excitement at seeing the future with her own eyes.

The man stood besides her, no longer tall and proud, back bent under the weight of a hundred failures. A hundred dead. He didn’t want to learn the girl’s name. It was unnecessary. He had known the names of all the people whom he had killed, there was no need to add another to the list. Especially not that of his youngest subject. Names gave things personhood, hinted at a mind, a life, a story. The scientist had ended far too many of those. He pressed yet another needle into the woman’s arm, smile like a remnant of ages past. He needed someone just as foolhardy and enthusiastic as he was. Someone who wouldn’t give up in the face of a hundred, a thousand, ten thousand ghosts. Someone who would soldier on under the weight of a hundred stolen futures, three hundred thousand lives put on hold to wait forever.

The woman stirred, sighing through her nose, attempting to take a deep breath. The man froze, days lost in another lab flashing before him, infinite in their scale, his failure. Red hairpin, blue hairpin, golden molar, titanium hip, hearing aid, metal hair band, twin green hairpins, nose ring . . . so little remained of those people, yet he had so much to remember them by, if he ever sought out his old table.

The girl’s eyes briefly flickered open, then closed again “Cookies,” she mumbled, reliving happy dreams of eating a whole pack of sugary goods on her father’s shoulders. She felt sunlight on her skin, which in truth was simply the lamp pointed her way and heard her father’s monotone voice, which in truth was just the hum of the many scanners.

The man paused, then shook his head, smile briefly unburdened by the screams of those he had thrown out of the airlock, their gooey corpses forever lost to the cold emptiness of space. They had dreamed in their cells by the will of the uncaring bureaucratic machine, they had died by the will of uncaring fate which made no distinction between malice and mistake, they would float endlessly in space by the will of the uncaring cosmos until forever passed.

The scientist, checking the readings yet again, took another glance at his subject’s measly profile. Among the names of a hundred dead would be the name of one living person. Among the stories of three hundred thousand lives left to rot would be one allowed to continue. Among the record of his many failures would be one shining success, one messiah to save the rest. Proof that all this time the scientist hadn't toiled for nothing, hadn't simply wasted the lives he was supposed to save, doomed those who he was supposed to bring back. He told himself it was all worth it, it had to be.

The woman dreamed of her late father, of her kindly aunt, of her optimistic brother. She dreamed of washing test tubes in a lab, while listening to all the smarter people debate about their discovery, which she would never be credited for. She dreamed of being undburdened by a hundred dead, three hundred thousand begging for salvation. She slumbered, unaware that she was now the last best hope for a crumbling colony, the last best hope for a lonely old man who had dedicated his life to resurrecting the dead and damned. She dreamed of a life that could’ve been, a path cut short by the decree of a corporate stooge thirty-six years ago.

She would never know who had doomed her and those she loved.


End file.
